Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Did you know there's a mathematical

equation that can predict happiness? Let me explain. The University College

London did a study in 2014 about happiness and what they did is they came up with an equation to predict happiness, believe it or not.

They use an app called The Great Brain Experiment Smart Phone

Apped and they gave it to over 18,000 people worldwide to make predictions about happiness.

And then they came up with an equation, an equation that ended up being very good

at predicting how happy people will say they will be from moment to moment based on recent events. One thing that they found was, which I'm sure

will not be surprised with if we've been listening to this podcast for a while,

wealth accumulation during the experiment did not have any predictive power for happiness.

That, of course, wasn't a surprise for us.

But the second part, I think, also isn't a surprise, but it's a very good support of what we're teaching here.

It's about expectations.

What these researchers found was moment-to-moment happiness isn't just about how well things are going, but whether things are going

better than expected.

In other words, expectations are very important in our level of current happiness. In many ways this study is in

support of the added that it says if we lower our expectations we're more likely

to be happy. We're now going to go ahead and really examine what this study means for our lives.

But if you want to take a deeper look at the study, it was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Let me start with a simple example of life and how we are greatly affected by our expectations.

I just got back from a vacation holiday with my family who lives in Arizona now and

on one of the days we decided to visit a new aquarium that had been built in Scottsdale, Arizona.

It was a beautiful aquarium and we are having a very nice day.

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